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I doubt anyone in the history of MIT ever prepped more than 5 minutes for the Math part of the SAT.
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Quite an assumption and hardly true. You're an alum, how would you know what high school students have to go through these days? There's tremendous pressure from everything. Everyone will spend more than 5 minutes looking at the math part, no matter how smart they are. Students don't go in without knowing how the test is formatted and how its questions are formulated. And that takes more than 5 min.
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Excelling in class does not indicate a lack of creativity...And having a quirky, "interesting" personality doesn't indicate any abundance of creativity.
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Having a quirky personality does indicate a tendency to think differently.
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They looked for the student with the A+s because that student is the one that has such passion that they try to go above and beyond what is presented in class.
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Yet this is not true either. Having A+s does not indicate passion. I got a few A+s in high school and I wasn't really into the subjects. It was just a matter of doing really well. A grade does not indicate anything at all except for ability in the class. A B student could be more passionate than an A student.
The proposal for automatic admission with high GPA and USAMO qualification is ridiculous. What if this person had nothing interesting to say in the essays and came off as someone who did nothing but study because the person was so bent on getting high scores? It shows a lack of personality. Opportunities presented in college might go to waste because this person will perhaps still be bent on just getting a high GPA in college.
Someone already said it, numbers aren't the best indicators of future success. That's why MIT changed its admissions process. They now look for the context in which these numbers came from.